For one second all I know, everything is made of snow

[sovay]

I was just informed that there will be a television adaptation of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969).

If the Gethenian characters are not cast with genderqueer actors, I will feel someone is missing the point.

Comments

[sovay]

Altho, the BBC did do a full cast adaptation of Darkness a while back

See, I have much less difficulty with the idea of a radio version because then its central conceit depends on the androgyny of the voices, which it looks like they handled by casting a mix of actors of different genders who are all in mostly the same vocal range; that's clever. Onscreen, the question of bodies comes into play, and I worry it will all go heteronormative by default unless there are deliberately disruptive factors, like actors whose gender identity more closely matches the Gethenian norm than cis (I believe straight) Genly.* Speaking of whom—

Genly Ai Kobna Holdbrook-Smith

Dude. Maybe they just want him for the TV version?

* The other issue being, obviously, representation and identification: I know a lot of people, including myself, who saw themselves in Winter, and that deserves to be reflected onscreen.

[edit] I get that not every science fiction adaptation I see can be Bellona, Destroyer of Cities, but seriously, why not?

[kore]

SERIOUSLY HOW DID I MISS THAT

[kore]

-- andyeah, I think you're quite right about the voices -- they cast those well, and Lesley Sharp is great as Estraven. Disembodied voices aren't gender-free, obviously, but they can blur the lines that society otherwise likes to draw broad and dark, which I think happens in Left Hand a lot as Genly is forced to reconsider all his previous pre-conceptions -- prejudices -- like Estraven drawing up accounts in a manner that could be "either scientific or housewifely," I loved that. What is virtue in a scientist could also be virtue in a housewife? Or is something that's a housewifely skill not impressive, by default? And the deliberate genderfuckery, like her writing 'the King was pregnant,' and Genly's landlady being a man. It's amazing she wrote as genderqueer as she did, writing as a cishet woman at the dawn of the seventies, through a male gaze and with male pronouns. Genly's always frantically looking for the binary in Estraven, the EITHER/OR, male or female, friend or sexual partner, confidant or schemer, rescuer or traitor. But he's always both, which is of course Genly's big moment of enlightenment, so simple a realization and so terribly hard for him to realize.

(I have a love-hate relationship with Genly. He's a very charming narrator but he's also sexist and Lord is he sheltered. I remember the first time I read the book I was groaning at his naievete right along with Estraven. Which is unfair, he's supposed to be the untouched First Envoy above politics and the human connection and all that, but he misses SO MANY cues. But I guess that's the point.)

This was also really interesting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsBgiOqg4Zg

it's the scene where Estraven thaws Genly's eye, which in the book takes about half a paragraph and maybe two sentences, but this really makes you feel the physicality of it.

[sovay]

I loved that. What is virtue in a scientist could also be virtue in a housewife? Or is something that's a housewifely skill not impressive, by default?

Well, it tells you how minutely Genly genders even ostensibly neutral activities like arithmetic.

Genly's always frantically looking for the binary in Estraven, the EITHER/OR, male or female, friend or sexual partner, confidant or schemer, rescuer or traitor. But he's always both, which is of course Genly's big moment of enlightenment, so simple a realization and so terribly hard for him to realize.

Yes. Which is another reason I want an adaptation where the only heteronormativity is coming from Genly, as there's no one else on the planet who should be bringing gender roles to the party.

Which is unfair, he's supposed to be the untouched First Envoy above politics and the human connection and all that, but he misses SO MANY cues. But I guess that's the point.

I had a reaction to Genly that I realized years later was akin to my reaction to Gentlemen's Agreement (1947)—while I like and sympathize with him as a narrator, there were ways in which his familiar lens felt stranger to me than the alien world I was supposed to see through him—only Le Guin knew exactly what she was doing with that kind of double vision and I'm really not sure Kazan's movie did.

[kore]

Well, it tells you how minutely Genly genders even ostensibly neutral activities like arithmetic.

//scowls more at Genly Remember when he tells Estraven "Women tend to eat less"? YEAH, AROUND MEN, YOU SCHMUCK ....ahem.

I had a reaction to Genly that I realized years later was akin to my reaction to Gentlemen's Agreement (1947)—while I like and sympathize with him as a narrator, there were ways in which his familiar lens felt stranger to me than the alien world I was supposed to see through him—only Le Guin knew exactly what she was doing with that kind of double vision and I'm really not sure Kazan's movie did.

Oh, that's very good! I like that a lot. Le Guin said in her written and rewritten annotated essay on writing Left Hand that she thought men kind of approved of the book more than women -- that it gave them this journey into androgyny and back out again. But the female readers wanted more, they pushed harder. But she does play with it -- Genly's a privileged man, from a sweeping interstellar alliance, but he's also very solitary and disbelieved, and he's not white, altho I think race doesn't really come up on Gethen. Estraven thinks at one point he blends in too well, that's why they don't believe him, IIRC.

when I read the book as a teenager I was so upset I wrote fix-it fic in my head where Estraven barely survived but he did and Genly nursed him back to health &c &c. fannish before I knew what fandom was

[kore]

Not to mention in the metaframing or however it would be put -- here was a woman, writing in a male-dominated field, writing a central male character in first person and giving us what she thought of as a male perspective on androgynous aliens. Altho I think at that period in her career Le Guin was still resisting what she thought of as 'radical' feminism and going for humanism, altho that changed quite quickly in the seventies, and I think really was evident in her writing through the eighties (Eye of the Heron, Always Coming Home, Beginning Place, Tehanu).